


bow Ficlets

by Hope



Series: bow 'verse (Lotrips AU) [3]
Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Gen, Vampires
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-11-06
Updated: 2003-11-05
Packaged: 2017-10-02 00:46:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 1,510
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/854
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hope/pseuds/Hope





	1. bowlijah ficlet

He spent almost a century roaming in catacombs spread like the roots of a tree beneath a country house deep-set in the moors, rejecting the sting of the crisp night air in favour of the humid embrace in pockets of earth, sweating stone instead of the pungent crush of heather beneath a horse's hooves as it reared and screamed, rider thrashing uselessly and the heat of blood thick in Elijah's mouth.

He grew adept at cracking a rat's spine with a sharp twist of his fingers, learnt how to part the coarse fur with his lips and how to achieve the sudden bitter flood with his first bite. He grew impatient, ambitious; strayed further up where the dust was more fine over the age-eaten stone and wood more well-worn with the touch of years.

He revelled in the harvest of adventuring children and drunken lovers for decades, dragging the desiccated corpses further down into the beam-braced chambers, away from the house. Biting through rough linen and brocade and silk, sucking the red taint off chained crucifixes and diamond pendants.

They came with fire. His eyes were open and the orange of the flame in the dense dark spurred him away, deeper, blinded but knowing the cracks and stains in the walls and floor better than he knew his own face, with sound and heat and rage crackling after him until he can go no further. Bones sharp and rolling away under his knees and palms and he crawls through the rotting remnants of his prior meals, pressing desperately at the crumbling stone, teeth bared and fingers clawing as a torch thrown into the detritus overwhelming the chamber catches alight and lashes heat closer and closer.

Cool earth surrounding him, then, _so hungry_, and the skin and fingernails torn away growing back almost instantly, though not without pain. And emerging, dirt-clad and naked but for the low blanket of cloud smothering the moors and blood, covering him and steaming its heat away into the desperate openness of the night air.


	2. Orlando

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> originally posted [here](http://www.livejournal.com/users/angstslashhope/375390.html).
> 
> answers from the "ask one of my characters a question" meme.
> 
> 4.bow orlando question asked by jubilancy: _how have you been coping with the things you saw? are you haunted? Are you jealous of Elijah because he has Dom?_

There's some strange stuff around this city, it's like the whole town is wound up and worked up and it's as if it's clawing at itself like a madman trying to shed his skin... There's some strange stuff going on. You might not even notice it on the surface and that makes it all the worse when it suddenly ... comes out at you, makes it all the worse. That night... was one of those times. Since this winter came on... I don't know. I never remember much before it started, I don't think many people can really pinpoint _when_ exactly it started anyway. It crept up and no one really noticed until they started losing their jobs, until the coal became less of a commodity and more of a luxury. Until people weren't just working for a living, they were working to _live_. I'd been able to pick up music so easily, quite a simple matter, really, and though I hate to say it, the cold kind of carved out the city into sharper lines; there were less grey areas and more black and white, to fall back on familiar phrasing - there were people who could afford the dance houses, and people who couldn't. And the people who could... could they ever. If it weren't for the way they flung their money in the face of the death and ice around them, us musicians would be out on the streets, probably long dead with the most of them... I have to cope. There's strange stuff all over this city, stuff that wouldn't be around if this place wasn't so... _dead_. I feel like there's more corpses around here than living people, and most of everyone else acts like they're dead anyway. I came so close, that night... I don't want to be mixed up with that stuff. I _can't_. But that's far behind me, now... That's the thing about this city. Where I am now is not so much different from that place... But it's not as if I'm being reminded of what happened back there. The surface of the city is like a dead space, nothing is nurtured there, plant, human or memory... I find I'm forgetting already the faces of the other musicians at that place, of my landlord, the path from my old room to the dance hall... I'm not sure I could find my way back there even if I wished to.


	3. Geoffrey

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> originally posted [here](http://www.livejournal.com/users/angstslashhope/375390.html).
> 
> answers from the "ask one of my characters a question" meme.
> 
> 3\. bow geoffrey question asked by oneangrykate: _Where do you want to be in five years?_

Well Miss Angrykate (or would it be too forward to address you as 'One'?), now that's a difficult question. I originally joined the police force for me mam more than any 'ulterior' motive, if you follow my meaning, after my da died we were both set to be thrown out onto the streets. The city has no vested interest in widows such as her, and it's been so many years now since young lads such as myself (well, young as i was at that time) have been recruited to join the army. The wars in this place have moved in rather than out; people are fighting their own wars day by day, no great troop of strapping young men are going to help them, even if they could. But I'm drifting off topic, if you'll forgive me, Miss One. In five years I hope still to be bringing home me mam enough wood to keep her warm for the winter, which is all the time now. Sometimes I wonder what'll happen when we run all out of wood in this cold stone city. Will we burn all the money? What precious little of it we see about, anyway. I've overheard Inspector Bean muttering about it before - or at least, overheard Inspector Bean muttering about Commissioner Rhys-Davies (not that I was eavesdropping or nothing), who thinks we should burn all the corpses that we find about in the mornings after particularly cold nights. There's not much room left in the graveyards for many more bodies; no doubt the Commissioner wishes to reserve what spaces there are left for people of his sort, as opposed to ours, or the sort of the poor boys from the mines who would freeze on the way home, 'exposure' is a nice term for it, and makes the most sense, I suppose - after all that time in the close, black caves it'd be more of a mite shock to the system to come out into all this whiteness and ice. In five years I'll most likely be following around the Inspector still, making sure he's got his little notebook and trying not to remember how sometimes the bodies that come with the dawn aren't all pale and pristine like they've just fallen asleep; how sometimes they've been out in the cold for too long, been out and *alive* for too long and their toes have died and rotted off before their heart's stopped, toes and fingers and even ears and noses sometimes. Like their bodies are warring against them, eating away and dying while they're still fighting. Seems like it's lost already to me, once you're out there that's the end. If the cold don't get you, something else will. I try not to remember. Inspector Bean keeps track of every little detail and his little book is enough for me; I try not to remember as me mam greets me at the door when I come home, the fire stoked up and a kettle of tea all set and ready for drinking, but I can see she knows it too, how close we were to that. How close we still are. As long as we're still living in five years, and I still have my job... That's all I could ask for. All I dare to ask for.


	4. Elijah

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> originally posted [here](http://www.livejournal.com/users/angstslashhope/375390.html).
> 
> answers from the "ask one of my characters a question" meme.
> 
> 1\. bow elijah  
> question asked by trianne: _If you could actually have a sexual relationship with Dom, would you top or bottom?_

*blinks lazily* once it might have occurred to me to resent the kind of question that asked _if I could_ but then I can't expect you to understand. I have no need for a 'sexual' relationship, no urge; I've witnessed the frantic rutting in the gutters of the city, witnessed tiny corpses of infants frozen to the stone in the alleyways with the rest of the city's refuse. There is no escape, that way, but then there is no escape in my survival-seeking either; it is my fate and curse to feed off others in order to survive, and also to procreate. The taking of blood, inducing of death, ensures my survival and yet in giving my own blood I am able to create, or destroy. I was a mind to think it the latter when I first came into being as I am now (as I have been for so long...), it is a curse more than anything, birth with consciousness, with resentment, regret. Anger.

Dominic will give, but there is only so much he will _take._ His understanding is different than mine, _has_ to be different on that fundamental level. I would have it no other way. It's one of the few things we have in common with one another.

**Author's Note:**

> http://www.livejournal.com/users/angstslashhope/504597.htm  
> http://hopeful-fiction.livejournal.com/20249.html


End file.
